page-break-after

The page-break-after property is used to specify whether or not a page break should occur after the element it is applied to.

Page breaks are applied to paged media, such as printed books or documents. When a page is broken, the layout ends in the current page and the remaining elements of the document are laid out in a new page. You can see this in PDF documents, where some pages have a lot of white space left, and content continues on the next page. If no page break rules are specified, the page may break inside pieces of content such as text, lists, code snippets, images, etc.

The page-break-after property also specifies on what page (left or right) the subsequent content should resume.

For example, you can tell the user agent to break a page after certain elements like chapter footnotes or appendices, colophons, tables of content, etc., therefore making sure that any content that comes after them will start in a new page.

In the following example, we’re using the @media rule to specify page break styles for printed documents. We’ll select the #table-of-contents element and tell the user agent to break the page after the table of content:

@media print {
    #table-of-content {
        page-break-after: always;
    }
}
                

Using page-break-after, you can cause a page break after the table of contents and tell the user agent to make sure the next page is right or left page. For example, if you want to start the first chapter after the table of contents on a right page (in a left-to-right language), you can do that by using the right value. See the Values and Examples sections below for more information and an example.

The page-break-after property is applied to block-level elements in the normal flow of the root element. User agents may also apply it to other elements, e.g., ‘table-row’ elements.

Trivia & Notes

Page breaks may help avoid or cause orphans and widows in pages.

When a page break splits a box, the box’s margins, borders, and padding have no visual effect where the split occurs.

This property is in progress of being replaced by the more generic break-after property. This new property also handles column and region breaks while being syntactically compatible with page-break-after. Thus after using page-break-after, check if you can use break-after instead.